Bottom Line

Common wisdom holds that you should never reveal your personal information online. Sometimes, though, you can't avoid it. When you buy the latest drone or smart speaker online, you give the merchant your address for shipping, credit card details for payment, and email address for notifications. But for $39 per year, Abine's Blur service lets you shop and surf in privacy, masking your actual personal details. It also includes a basic password manager. A free edition includes password management, email address masking, and tracker blocking.

Blur installs in your browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari) and puts a single, simple button on the toolbar. Clicking the button brings up a small panel that in turn offers access to four major function areas: Accounts, Wallet, Masking, and Tracking. Your private data is all stored locally.

For full access to the program's dashboard, simply click the word Blur at the bottom left of the popup panel. The dashboard lets you configure the same four function areas: Accounts, Wallet, Masking, and Tracing. From the dashboard you can also send a link to install Blur on your iOS or Android devices.

Do Not Track

Your web surfing habits are your own business, right? In truth, advertisers, social media sites, and web analytics groups all profit by tracking where you go on the web. Your browser can send a Do Not Track header, but websites can choose to ignore it. Abine pioneered the idea of a Do Not Track system that actively prevents this kind of tracking. Several general-purpose security products include a similar active Do Not Track function, among them AVG AntiVirus Free and Kaspersky Internet Security.

For each website you visit, the Blur toolbar button in the browser displays how many trackers it detected and blocked. Clicking the button brings up the access panel for Blur services; clicking Tracking in that panel displays full details. You can see exactly which ad aggregators, social media sites, and web analytics systems Blur prevented from tracking you. This panel also lets you turn off blocking for any specific tracker, or for an entire website. Clicking a link opens a chart of your tracker-blocking statistics over time.

Password Management

Blur includes a straightforward password manager. As expected, it captures credentials when you log in and automatically fills saved credentials when you revisit the site. If you've saved more than one set of credentials, it offers a menu of available logins.

From the online dashboard, you can view a list of all your passwords and optionally edit or delete entries. Like LastPass, Dashlane, and many others, Blur lets you assign a friendly label to each saved password. However, you can't organize them into groups or categories. Blur can import passwords from LastPass, Dashlane, RoboForm, AgileBits 1Password, and several other password managers.

You can enhance protection of your stored passwords by enabling two-factor authentication. Blur supports authentication using Google Authenticator or a work-alike such as Twilio Authy or Duo Mobile. You can also set it to lock automatically after a period of inactivity, or when the browser restarts.

Blur offer to generate a strong password when you're signing up for a new service or changing an existing password. Initially, it offers to make a strong password, or a strong password with customization. It defaults to 10-character passwords using uppercase letters, lowercase letters, digits, and special characters. That's rather low, given that you don't have to remember the generated password, and given that many users just accept the default. LastPass and 1Password default to 20 characters, and the free Myki Password Manager & Authenticator generates 30-character passwords out of the box.

If you choose to customize, you can raise the password length and disable digits or special characters for sites that don't accept them, but your generated passwords always include capital and small letters. Keeper Password Manager & Digital Vault, Dashlane, LastPass, and many others give you full control over character sets used.

If you forget your master password, you can create a new one, but you'll lose all your saved passwords. To avoid that awkward situation, Blur generates what it calls a "Backup Passphrase." Mine consisted of 12 words, more than 80 characters. You can use this passphrase to regain access to your passwords in emergency. Abine suggests you store it securely.

Blur used to rely on your Dropbox account for syncing your stored data across multiple PC, Mac, or mobile devices, but now uses its own servers. It encrypts your data locally, so nothing is exposed to Abine.

The Backup and Sync features aren't available in the free edition; premium users can also opt for local-only storage. But be warned, local storage is iffy. The FAQ states "If you have your information stored locally (i.e. you do not have Backup & Sync authorized), DO NOT CLEAR YOUR CACHE, unless you are OK with having your accounts & passwords removed. If you lose your accounts due to a cache reset, there is no way to recover those lost accounts." That's pretty dire. If you must use local-only storage, be sure to export your data frequently.

Blur used to rate your overall password security using an algorithm that took into account password strength and reused passwords. In an unusual twist, reused usernames also lowered your security, so to get a top rating you had to make use of masked emails. The current edition displays a simple dashboard that shows the total number of accounts, the number of reused passwords, and the number of masked email usernames (more about those below). You can see a password strength rating by opening any item. LastPass, Keeper, LogMeOnce Password Management Suite Ultimate and a few others have an actionable password strength report that lists all your passwords from weakest to strongest.

Blur doesn't include advanced features like secure sharing of passwords or digital password inheritance after your death. It does automatically fill web forms, but that ability technically belongs to the Wallet feature, discussed below.

Anonymous Email Addresses

Every time you enter your email address at a website, you risk the possibility that the site owner will sell it to spammers, or that hackers will exfiltrate your data from the site. Blur solves that problem with masked email addresses. Instead of giving the site your actual address, you generate a masked address using Blur, and add a descriptive reminder for where you used this specific address. Messages sent to the masked address arrive in your inbox; the merchant or other website never sees your true address.

A temporary inbox displays messages received via masked email addresses for a day, but typically you'll view them in your regular email client. This feature does give you a quick way to notice spam and turn off the corresponding masked address.

From the dashboard, click Masking and then click Masked Emails to view all your masked email addresses, along with the number of times you've used each. If you start getting spam via one of these masked addresses, simply turn off mail forwarding or delete the address completely. To make that process simple, Blur inserts a header in the forwarded email with a link to block the corresponding masked email address. It's a clever solution to an annoying problem.

Masks Your Credit Card Numbers

Tracker blocking, password management, and masked email addresses are all available in the free edition of Blur. For access to masked credit cards and other advanced features, you must upgrade to the premium edition. New users get to try premium features free for 30 days.

Masked credit cards work much the same way as masked email addresses. You register an actual credit or debit card with Abine; online merchants never see that card. When you click in the credit card field to pay online, Blur pops up and offers to create a masked card.

At the time you create the masked card, you fill in the precise amount that you're about to pay online. In truth, a masked credit card is more like a prepaid gift card that happens to hold precisely the amount needed for your current transaction. The merchant can't charge more than the specified amount.

When you confirm creation of the masked card, Abine bills your actual credit card for the amount you chose. You use Blur to automatically fill in your own address for shipping, and Abine's address for billing. The transaction shows up on your credit card bill as a charge from Abine. If you wind up not using the masked card, you can cancel it and request a refund with one click.

I tried the service, right up to the point of actually spending money. It worked very smoothly, and I had no trouble getting the correct amount refunded. Note that you can't create a masked card worth less than 10 dollars, but if you truly need to charge a smaller amount, you can spend it and then refund the remainder.

Keep Your Phone Number Private

You can install Blur on your Android or iOS phone or tablet and sync your data through Abine's servers. Syncing is seamless, once you've set it up on your desktop. You get all the same features as the desktop edition.

The mobile edition adds one najor new feature—a masked phone number option. Unlike masked emails and credit cards, the masked phone number is a singular new phone number that forwards calls, texts, and voicemails to your actual phone number. When filling web forms, you can click "Mask My Phone" to enter the masked number.

All callers appear in the Blur dashboard. If you don't want to receive any more calls from a number, just set forwarding to OFF for that number. The caller will hear a message stating that the number is no longer available. You can make calls from the masked number, and receive texts, but you can't send texts. You can't use masked phone numbers everywhere, but Blur supports use in the US, the UK, and 13 other countries.

Your subscription gets you $3 per month for masked phone usage. Each call and text costs one cent, and each minute of talking costs another penny. If you run out, you can add more in increments of $1, $2.50, or $5 directly from the app.

The mobile edition offers a few other features not found in Blur's desktop edition. On modern iPhones and Androids, you can authenticate to Blur using your fingerprint. And you can set it to force biometric authorization for purchases made through the app.

On an iPhone, if you want tracker blocking and access to all Blur features you use the built-in browser or work in Safari via Blur's extension. Blur also offers instructions on how to tweak your iPhone's settings to limit advertiser tracking and location tracking. Android users can choose to enable Blur in Chrome and other apps using Android's Accessibility feature. But in general, the feature sets are very similar between iPhone and Android.

Blur Wallet

The Masked Cards icon also appears as an option in Blur Wallet, along with three Auto-fill options. Many password managers, most notably RoboForm, use their skills to fill web forms as well as login credentials. Blur can fill addresses, credit cards, and identities.

Address refers to a simple snail mail address, with name, street, apartment, city/state/zip, and country. Cleverly, Blur just asks for the zip code and automatically fills the corresponding state and city. There's no option for a second address line, but you might be able to make do using the apartment field.

Each Identity shows up on two tabs, Auto-Fill Preferences and Your Info. On the first of those pages you enter a full name, select an existing address (or create a new one), and indicate whether you want to use a specific email and phone number or use masked ones by default. By default, Blur automatically generates a strong password for password fields and a masked card for credit card fields, though you can turn these options off.

On the Your Info page, you can enter gender, date of birth, preferred username for new accounts, the URL of your website, your company and title, your SSN, and your driver's license number. Other products offer a wider variety of data fields. For example, with Keeper you can enter Home, Mobile, and Work phone numbers. RoboForm Everywhere allows multiple instances of any field. But Blur covers the basics.

You can only have one credit card backing your masked cards, but you can record details for any number of non-masked cards in the Blur Wallet. You start by recording one or more snail-mail addresses, then enter each credit card's details and associate it with one of your addresses. That's it! The popup dialog that offers the masked credit card feature also lets you choose a non-masked card and fill in the details.

In testing, Blur did a better job than in the previous review. It filled in almost all fields correctly, and offered to gin up a masked credit card. The only real error involved filling the SSN value into both the SSN and driver's license fields.

Clear Data Privacy Policies

The point of using Blur is to protect your online privacy, but you necessarily give a ton of personal information to Abine. Should you worry? Abine's clear data privacy policy details precisely which data items Abine necessarily retains, and which items are completely out of the company's reach.

For example, Abine must retain your email address and your masked email addresses, to seamlessly ensure that mail reaches your inbox. However, it encrypts your passwords locally on your device, and optionally stores them in encrypted form for syncing, so Abine has no access to them. The US government requires payment processors to retain purchase records, but Abine won't share those (or anything else) with third parties. If served with a subpoena, the company would of course provide information to law enforcement, and that would include purchase records.

Blurring the Lines

You can surf the web anonymously using a VPNor TOR, but when it comes to making purchases, you have to tell the website where to send the merchandise. You'll also need to enter your email address, and credit card information. Abine Blur does an admirable job of preserving your privacy throughout this process, and also serves as a basic password manager and form filler. There's nothing else quite like it. Blur is an Editors' Choice for privacy protection.

If you're concerned about online privacy, give Blur a try. You can experiment with all the premium features for 30 days, and then decide whether it's worth $39 a year to you.

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About the Author

Neil Rubenking served as vice president and president of the San Francisco PC User Group for three years when the IBM PC was brand new. He was present at the formation of the Association of Shareware Professionals, and served on its board of directors. In 1986, PC Magazine brought Neil on board to handle the torrent of Turbo Pascal tips submitted by readers. By 1990, he had become PC Magazine's technical editor, and a coast-to-coast telecommuter. His "User to User" column supplied readers with tips and solutions on using DOS and Windows, his technical columns clarified fine points in programming and operating systems, and his utility articles (over forty of ... See Full Bio